With the ever increasing prevalence of computing devices and their use by individuals and businesses, the amount of information and processing needs continue to expand. Further, given the increasing use of web-based applications in all phases of commerce, increasing services are provided by data centers.
Many data centers are implemented by single businesses for their own use. However, another model has developed, where a managed hosting corporation provides computing capacity to customers via various computing resources present in a multi-tenant data center. Traditionally, such multi-tenant data centers provided for dedicated computing devices for each customer. According to this model, security concerns are kept to a minimum, as each customer's domain is separate and distinct from all other customers. However, there are drawbacks to this dedicated computing approach. Most particularly, to have enough computing support available when demand requires it, customers can be forced to purchase greater dedicated computing resources than they may otherwise need.
As result of this and other computing trends, the availability of so-called cloud computing has emerged. In general, cloud computing can be thought of as the providing of computing resources to an end user via the Internet, where the end user generally does not have dedicated access to the underlying physical computing devices. All manners of users have adopted the cloud computing model and accordingly many data centers including multi-tenant data centers have begun providing for cloud computing resources. Typically, the cloud computing resources are kept separate and independent from dedicated computing resources within a data center.
Thus although a customer of the data center can obtain additional computing resources as needed via the cloud computing domain, generally the customer is not able to directly connect its dedicated resources and cloud resources. As a result, communications between these different domains, even when between resources of a common customer, traverse a public network. Accordingly, a truly private environment between these disparate resources is not possible. Further, latency issues may arise in these communications.
Further still, such communications are generally billed to a customer as if the communications were between the customer and a non-affiliated entity. Thus by connecting computing devices of different security domains over a public network (such as the Internet), certain issues can arise such as a bandwidth billing challenge, in which communications over the public network are charged on either side, such that a single communication could be paid for multiple times. For example in some data centers, both outbound and inbound traffic on the public interface could be billed on the cloud side, and outbound traffic on the dedicated side may also be billed. Thus a multi-billing situation can occur for communications between resources of a single customer.